The Many Pleasures of Getting 'Lost'

December 09, 2008|Jen Chaney

I am a "Lost" fanatic.

Obsessive fans tend to hold our favorite TV shows to extremely high standards. That's why I met Tuesday's arrival of "Lost: Season Four -- The Expanded Experience," on DVD ($60) and Blu-ray ($70) with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. As devout followers of the desert island drama know, the fourth season was, arguably, the strongest in the show's history and, thanks to the writers' strike, the shortest. With only 13 episodes to include in this year's box set, I wondered if the DVD would seem a little on the emaciated side.

Thankfully, the "Lost" crew was smart enough to add a freighter full of bonus features to compensate for the shortened season, making this collection perhaps the most delicious series of DVDs I've dug into this holiday season. All those viewers who spend hours debating such important topics as "Benjamin Linus: Bad Guy With Good Intentions or Certified, Diabolical Freak?" will find similar joy in the treasure trove of extras included here.

Like the "Lost" DVDs that have come before, this one includes numerous behind-the-scenes featurettes, a blooper reel, a handful of deleted scenes, several Easter eggs embedded in its menu screens and a smattering of commentary tracks.

In addition to those usual suspects, Season Four also delivers the fascinating featurette, "The Island as Backlot: 'Lost' in Hawaii," which explains how the production staff transforms various Oahu locations into the many international locales -- including Iraq, Berlin and Tunisia -- where the sprawling drama's story is set. Both collections also include a documentary about how Academy Award nominee Michael Giacchino composes the show's score, a segment that includes footage from a 2007 performance of "Lost" music by the Honolulu Symphony Pops. The Blu-ray contains even more footage from that event.

As solid as the whole package is, two extras are most likely to fire up fans fixated on the future of the Oceanic 815 survivors. The first? "Oceanic Six: A Conspiracy of Lies," a faux expose that raises numerous questions about the story concocted last season by the six crash survivors who returned to civilization. ("Could the Oceanic Six be at the center of one of the greatest conspiracies in recent history?" asks an ominous narrator. Uh, they better be. Or a lot of "Lost" lovers are going to be supremely ticked off.)

And then there's my favorite, "Course of the Future," an interactive feature that requires viewers to place several events from the show in chronological order, a challenge considering the writers' out-of-sequence approach to storytelling. Completing that mission unlocks access to every flash-forward from season four, shown in order, uninterrupted and, on the Blu-ray, alongside notations from the scripts. It's the perfect primer for season five, which begins in January, and yet another reminder that when it comes to tapping into what the fans want, the people behind this television phenomenon are anything but lost.

Most Bizarre Piece of Island Intel: In one of the numerous Easter eggs, co-creator Damon Lindelof attempts to explain an important detail about the island on "Lost" ... by using a Plastic Man analogy. After describing how the cartoon character could conceivably stay seated on his sofa while stretching his hand upstairs to grab a coffee cup off of his nightstand, he notes, "The island is the same way. Except the coffee cup is Jack (Shephard)." Yeah. Sure. Totally with you on that one.